We will revisit Kate Chopin's well-known novel, The Awakening, through a reconsideration of the apparently familiar notion of awakening. An encounter will be staged between the text of The Awakening and that of George Bataille's Inner Experience. Awakening will thus come to read "awakening-unto-death," awakening qua recognition and acceptance of the fact of death, the absolute limit of experience and knowledge. The moment at the very end of the novel, the moment Edna is ready to embrace the unknown of the sea, will be identified as the promise of this awakening. A last image this reading will risk will be that of an Edna beyond the novel, an Edna laughing while swimming. The events preceding and supposedly leading to this ending will be read as a story of intoxication, an intoxication meant to avoid or at least postpone the moment of awakening as awakening-unto-death.

In a queer-theory reading of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in the 2004 polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman relied on a narrow concept of reproduction as procreative heteronormativity anchored in heterosexual sex. He left untold the other story of reproduction: our daily reproduction in the service of capitalism. Marxist and materialist feminist theories of reproduction remind us that we all engage in reproductive work and that women have traditionally been considered natural providers of this work. A reading of J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man, in which a male protagonist depends on the domestic labor of a migrant woman, provides a counterpoint to No Future.

Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential study Rabelais and His World, a generation of scholars have thought of laughter as subversive—of norms, institutions, religion, gender. The literary canon, however, is ripe with situations in which characters refrain from laughing at certain objects.

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